Party discipline in pursuit of power versus the public good

Justin Trudeau's decision this week to screen potential candidates for the Liberal party by demanding they adopt a "pro choice" stance on abortion raises many questions.
First, it questions whether or not Trudeau is confident in the Liberal Party's commitment to a 2012 policy decision to make it a pro-choice party, given that there are sitting members whose personal conviction is "pro-life" and not "pro-choice". There is no pending vote on the question likely to come before parliament, however, and a woman's access to therapeutic abortion in all stages of a pregnancy is fairly well assured across the country through a combination of public opinion and legal and government decisions and omissions of decisions.
So party "purity" and the option to present to voters a potential government that has declared its support for a woman's right to choose what happens to her body, in addition to the "party-purity" that the leader has the right to make absolute decisions regarding how the party will operate on difficult moral questions seem to be at the heart of the matter.
And so there are really two major questions emerging from this surprise decision.
First, is it wise for a political leader of any stripe to declare party policy, based on "pursuit-of-power" needs, even though historically this matter has been one of conscience, and open to a free vote without the restrictions of party discipline? Is Canada now at the stage in our political development where matters that were once considered too important to be "ruled" by party 'whipping' (in parliamentary terms) have become the exclusive purview of the political class, its leaders and its insiders?
While the writer has declared, many times, in this space, support for a woman's right to choose, this space has also sought space for diversity, for tolerance of diversity and for a tolerance for ambiguity that lies at the heart of generating space and gas in the body politic's 'shock-absorbers'. Not governments, nor religious institutions nor social institutions, nor schools nor colleges nor universities... none of these social organs should be advocating for an absolute position on any single issue. In fact, it is the pursuit of absolutist positions that lies at the heart of much of the conflict in the public discourse and conflict.
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, in his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention, once declared, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Is Trudeau's declaration worthy of being considered "extremism" or is it merely one neophyte party leader's attempt to gain control of his right flank internally, and "market" his party to the voter as a unified "brand"?
To Roman Catholics, and traditionally the Liberal Party has been and been seen to be the party to which most Roman Catholics gravitated, the Trudeau announcement has already provoked considerable protest, erupting in demonstrations on parliament hill only one day after its release. Trudeau's attempt to appear more inclusive, however, is fraught with the grafted perception that his perception of the issue as "settled" renders him naïve, simplistic and reductionistic, not to mention outright unacceptable to many hard-line Catholics, including the hierarchy.
If his decision is one that seeks to extricate the party from religious influence, and can and does succeed even to a limited degree, that would be a result worthy of the effort. However, rather than 'let sleeping dogs lie,' Trudeau may have, ironically and perhaps even tragically given rise to all of the voices in all of the political parties who seek to put an end to "state supported" abortions in Canada, through some combined initiative that crosses party lines, or some legal process that comes before the Supreme Court and somehow reverses the current status of the issue.
It is the question of the role of religion, formal religion, represented by specific faith communities on government policy that has raised its head in so many cases and places over the last decade plus. Extremists, religious zealots spring from all regions of this country, as well as from all countries on the globe. Their zealotry is often not restricted to terrorism and murder but includes many examples of exclusion and isolation and alienation and various forms of "gate-keeping" designed to preserve the "purity" of the faith, more literally, protect the faith dogma, as if that dogma represented the word of God. And for many of those zealots, it does.
Dogma, those declarations of belief that incorporate the application of belief to life decisions, especially around moral choices, has filtered down through the centuries from the pens and the pulpits of many mostly men. And, of course, in the pursuit of its preservation and protection, elaborate institutional 'extremes' have been designed and implemented, including in the Roman Catholic church the "Congregation of the Faith" in the Vatican. It is highly unlikely that Trudeau's single declaration will be more than an irritant to that "establishment" however strong his motive to separate his party from the formal and informal influence of the church.
And from a narrow 'vote-getting' proposition, with the NDP firmly committed to the "pro-choice" agenda, not from its leader's edict but from long-standing debates and decisions at the grass roots, it could be that the new home for "pro-life" voters will be the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper.
Sadly, Trudeau could have, in a single press statement, done more than all of the forthcoming advertising his party will underwrite, to re-elect the Harper gang. This issue does still have "legs" and tentacles that reach into the most private reflections of thousands of Canadians.
On another level, in attempting to project "authenticity" of the political party, Trudeau has raised the spectre that in order to "comply" with party discipline, individuals will respond to questions on "pro-choice" matters put by the party, in a way designed to meet the "party" litmus test, while continuing to maintain, in their private lives, a "pro-life" position in their spiritual and religious life. And that seeps deeply into the kind of culture and nation that permits and condones such hypocrisy.
We all know that "trust" is the currency of all relationships; and that politics is the public stage for the enactment of that exchange. To the degree that we trust our political representatives, to that degree they "earn" our votes". It was Andrea Horwath, the Ontario NDP leader, who declared that she did not "trust" the Liberals to enact their budget proposals and so she had to vote against the budget, bringing down the minority Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne/Dalton McGuinty.
“There’s a real danger here for Andrea Horwath that we’re going to enter into an election that will be highly polarized,” said Bryan Evans, a professor of politics at Ryerson University who studies the labour movement in Canada. “It could very well be that Andrea Horwath has committed the NDP to a kind of self-destruction” in which the party will be “squeezed” between two completely different visions unless it can differentiate itself greatly from the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives.
(By Sarah Boesveld, Andrea Horwath’s Waterloo? National Post, May 2, 2014)
By analogy, given that politics is one of the least "nuanced" of human endeavours, Trudeau may similarly have given Harper and his muzzled back-benchers enough new "conservative votes" (pro-life votes) to return to power, in a political culture that is equally polarized across the country.
Throwing Harper out in 2015, considered in this space a national cleansing, long overdue and long sought by millions of Canadians, will not result through a divided centre-left voting block. And Trudeau, should he really be committed to defeating Harper, might use the considerable public resonance of his and his family's persona, to form a coalition with the NDP, inspite of Michael Ignatieff's "There is only a red door and a blue door!" dictum when a formal coalition to bring the Harper government down dissipated. (The quote comes from Thomas Mulcair's lecture at Queen's University just a few days ago.)
Short-sighted, cryptic and headline-grabbing comments, such as the one Trudeau dropped on abortion, are not the sign of a seasoned political veteran, and while everyone has a learning curve, "on-the-job training" is not likely something Canadians are prepared to vote for in the election of 2015.
There is a legitimate and growing public voice being heard on the need to throw the "political class" out of power, given the nefarious and incestuous enmeshment of political operatives on the right and the left  to both big money and the support of the status quo. Trudeau's comment, while not likely intended to grow such voices and perceptions, could, nevertheless, generate more scepticism about the people from whom Canadian voters have to choose as their next leader. And that would hurt the political process, not only the Trudeau Liberals.

"Right" answers are little more than a reductionism for political power and control

This morning began with this reflection: Ukraine reminds me of the oldest child in a family of several siblings after a divorce, with both parents clinging to her as if their identities and their survival depended on her 'living' with each simultaneously. Given that there is only one "Ukraine" with several different parts, each parent is clinging to the part that they consider most important. Putin and his Russian oligarchy are determined to tear Ukraine apart, on the pretext that the 'west' including the United States and NATO are encroaching on his "domain" and luring Ukraine into their 'orbit' while the people in the EU and their governments are interested in supporting that part of the Ukrainian hopes and aspirations for democracy, free markets, access to education and health care and a legal system that is open, transparent and accountable. A political system is competing with an ethnicity for control of Ukraine, in the broadest and most blunt terms.
Politics, the apparatus through which we generate laws and procedures that demonstrate our trending ideas, attitudes, and ideologies, seems inevitably to conflict with the pursuit of individual freedoms and individual development and what Maslow so famously called "self-actualizing," all the while purporting to claim as the reason for its very existence the extension of opportunity. In presenting a "position" the political class expresses its vision of what they see as an ideal outcome, whether or not that outcome dovetails with the lives of those who carry out what the political class has 'decreed'. The people of Ukraine, quite naturally and tragically, are watching another chapter in the eternal conflict between political power and influence and their lives as a 'family' in which individuals are free to seek their own unique and different and separate identity.
The notion of an ideology, a world view, conflicting with another world view, within a family, has been around for centuries. One parent values the acquisition of money more highly than the other. Or one parent values a social conscience more than the other. Or one parent values travel and reading and exposure to different ideas more than the other. Or one parent imposes a much more harsh and cold discipline than the other. Or one parent subscribes to the pursuit of a spiritual identity as a top priority while the other prefers to live in the 'here-and-now' and concentrates on the daily routines. One parent loses him or herself in the theatre, the arts and among the people in that community while the other is more engaged with the world of earning a living and sees the arts as more frivolous and less productive. And the children are watching these little dramas unfold on a daily basis, wondering how to find their own place along the various continua of pathways they did not even know existed, until they began watching more closely the nuances of their parent's lives.
And so, if this happens around the kitchen table, it inevitably occurs also in every classroom in every nation. And as the classrooms veer to the 'right,' to the reductionisms embedded in the political class's need for re-election and continuing power, the lives of individual students are bent in the direction demanded by that "principle"....the need for power achieved through some kind of observable accountability...usually in test scores that permit comparisons, and also suggest measures of success in how the public money is being spent, in achieving something to which the political class can and will point during election campaigns.
To a significant extent, our education system, our corporate structure, our ecclesial structure, indeed our political system, regardless of the ideology of its practitioners, have all bent in the direction of simplification, and the enhancement of the power of those "in charge" without much regard for the implications of that power grab. And the results of that shift, a shift that includes the denial and the rejection of the needs of individuals and groups "under" the influence of the power brokers, is generating more conflict, inevitably, and more irritability, naturally, and more apathy and despair, expectedly in all kinds of social circumstances.
Families see parents in conflict, and have to question the underlying reasons for their breaking up. Schools too see students differently, more as pawns to the political class, than as individuals needing to be supported in the enhancement of their skills of discernment and problem solving, and not in the ability to produce 'right' answers, so that the political class can sustain its power.
So too in Ukraine, where the different voices are clanging in dissonance, as they pursue their own perception of how Ukraine should be governed, and whether it should be divided, or even remain as a country.
As a teacher for two-plus decades, I have deeply embedded images of children and families in my past, and given the evidence of  brokenness in families, of hopelessness in the stature and demeanour of the youth I see walking the streets of the places where I live and visit, and the move of all institutions to absolutes, and various forms of domination that depend on singular "right" answers to all of life's complexities, I doubt I could or would ever go back to the classroom even if the 'system' wanted me, which it clearly does not.
On the education front, a resignation letter from an eleven-year English teacher, demonstrates the significance of the political imposition of power on the learning process, and indeed has generated another "activist" opposed to the current cultural norms of acquiescence to the political class and its pursuit of its own power.
Read an excerpt of this resignation letter and weep:
I have sweet, incredible, intelligent children sitting in my classroom who are giving up on their lives already. They feel that they only have failure in their futures because they've been told they aren't good enough by a standardized test; they've been told that they can't be successful because they aren't jumping through the right hoops on their educational paths. I have spent so much time trying to reverse those thoughts, trying to help them see that education is not punitive; education is the only way they can improve their lives. But the truth is, the current educational system is punishing them for their inadequacies, rather than helping them discover their unique talents; our educational system is failing our children because it is not meeting their needs.
I can no longer be a part of a system that continues to do the exact opposite of what I am supposed to do as a teacher-I am supposed to help them think for themselves, help them find solutions to problems, help them become productive members of society. Instead, the emphasis on Common Core Standards and high-stakes testing is creating a teach-to-the-test mentality for our teachers and stress and anxiety for our students. Students have increasingly become hesitant to think for themselves because they have been programmed to believe that there is one right answer that they may or may not have been given yet. That is what school has become: A place where teachers must give students "right" answers, so students can prove (on tests riddled with problems, by the way) that teachers have taught students what the standards have deemed to be a proper education. (By Pauline Hawkins, in Huffpost, Why I'm Resigning After 11 Years as a Teacher, April 16, 2014)
Pauline Hawkins is an English instructor at Liberty High School in Colorado Springs, CO, where she has been teaching for 11 years. She also initiated the student-run newspaper, The LHS Revolution, and is its adviser; the paper is in its tenth year of publication. Read more by Pauline at paulinehawkins.com)

Will global warming and climate change finally get the respect it warrants?...we are sceptical

Although the United States has been dragging its collective feet on global warming and climate change for too long, the Obama administration has been moving along, behind the scenes, raising the mpg (miles per gallon) rate of gasoline needed to power automobiles, capping the construction of coal-fired electricity plants, and yesterday, releasing a report that puts the issue squarely in the present, as opposed to some far-off future problem.

The Republicans, lead by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, continue to sing the worn-out chorus that 'it will make no difference what the U.S. does if other countries do nothing about global warming and climate change' to their brain-dead constituents, continuing a well-established pattern of denial and avoidance.

However, it was to eight television weather forecasters from around the country that the administration made their pitch yesterday, believing not only in the trust Americans place in those talking heads, but also in their capacity to put the story out in each and every broadcast. Some have even begun to include climate forecasts in their daily weather broadcasts, as a way to grow public awareness and public responsibility for measures that can and will reduce the carbon imprint we leave on the planet.

Canada, on the other hand, continues to lag behind the United States, with Ottawa clinging to the cliché that unless and until India and China sign on to some international pact, there is no need to take global warming and climate change seriously. And reports today indicate that our fossil fuel exports have jumped some 900%, making us one of the premier "petro" economies in the world, something that environmentalists cringe to learn, as the appetite for fossil fuels continues seemingly unabated. Here is the way the New York Times framed the story about the existing evidence of deep and profound changes that are already observable, and the conclusions that the administration's report draws from those changes:

 

The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States, scientists reported Tuesday, with water growing scarcer in dry regions, torrential rains increasing in wet regions, heat waves becoming more common and more severe, wildfires growing worse, and forests dying under assault from heat-loving insects.

Such sweeping changes have been caused by an average warming of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over most land areas of the country in the past century, the scientists found. If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, they said, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.

“Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced,” the report continued. “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours. People are seeing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies, the plant varieties that thrive in their gardens, and the kinds of birds they see in any particular month in their neighborhoods.” ( By Justin Gillis, U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods, New York Times, May 6, 2014)

Miami, a city facing a threatened rise in sea levels has already begun constructing a massive underground pumping system that, its civic officials predict will prevent one inch of sea water from invading Miami streets. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, before leaving office, was already making noises, following hurricane Sandy, about that city's need to build retaining walls to ward off rising sea levels resulting from global warming and climate change.
Yet, there are few other regions that have taken the risks seriously enough to begin to pour public money into insurance measures that would address our collective and obviously impending crisis.
As the White House Spokesman told Gwen Ifill on PBS, 'the science that supports the growing climate change crisis is already established, although in the list of priorities, American people continue to put it fairly low on their list.'
This space has dedicated considerable time and energy toward raising the alarm about this issue that not only will define the futures of our grandchildren, but also the legacy of their grandparents, insofar as our willingness to make the sacrifices needed to at least ward off the worst effects of the most nasty scenario.
While we all drag our rainbow-coloured boxes to the curb each week, in order to facilitate some form of recycling, in order to put less pressure on our landfill sites, we continue to produce much more packaging than our needs require, in order to better accommodate the corporate interests who wish to make those millions of sales. We also continue to drive cars that gulp gasoline, when we all know that the technology for environmentally friendly vehicles has been available for decades, although purchased and hidden by the auto companies. We also continue to consider public policy  based on fossil fuels to be necessary in both the short and long terms, in order to preserve "jobs" and a rising GDP, when we also know that the jobs necessary for an environmentally secure future would result in even more employment and even better GDP prospects.
We are a civilization with our eyes securely focused on our immediate and often titillating wants, as if we had no responsibility for those who will inherit both our gifts and our mistakes.
Maybe it is time for us to begin to think about what the planet will look like, smell like, and feel like if we do nothing to curb our deeply embedded appetites and began to consider the longer term futures. It may do nothing for our immediate reputations; yet it may well offer lives of some worth and safety to our offspring and their's.

 

Challenging the church's role in this observation:"Man is a technical giant and an ethical child"

Scanning the news today, one finds a 'clip' from a conference convened in Rome by the Vatican's Academy of Sciences, in which one speaker grabs the headlines with this quote:
Man is a technical giant and an ethical child.
Pointing to a multitude of stories of natural disasters and human conflicts that see both hunger and over-consumption sleeping in the same bed, fire and flood sweeping the landscape, bloodshed and conflict pouring out of too many quarters, the phrase also acknowledges that man pays much more attention to his capacity to relate to a machine, no matter how sophisticated, as compared with his capacity to relate to each other in what could be called a collaborative manner.
The church has for centuries posited something it called "natural law" as a leaven on the theology of human ambition, greed and domination. Too much emphasis has been placed on the notion that man was given 'dominion' over the earth, in a phrase from Genesis, and the church has attempted to use nature as a monitor of "God's will and purpose" for humans. In relating ethics to natural law, as the standard by which man will be judged by God, the church has generated many 'sins' that illustrate how man has, is, and will deviate from God's intentions.
Birth control is one such example.
A scientific creation, borne out of years of research and experimentation, birth control has been for too long seen as a contravention of the natural 'rhythm' of the human body, the female menstrual cycle, and the dedication of the species to procreate, the sine qua non of holy matrimony. Unfortunately for the theology built on these assumptions, humans demonstrate every day  both the value of birth control and the corresponding value of partnering without offspring. Does that mean that humans have lost their  moral and ethical compass?
Hardly.
What it means, for starters, is that millions of practising Catholics around the world, in spite of the church's forbiddance, use birth control every day. It also means that, in so doing, those silent 'sinners' are calling into question the church's 'ethical' control of their lives, in the name of God, or at least the church's representation of God.
The church has also imposed other expectations on its followers. Among them, chastity, poverty, humility and obedience, not so much to God as to the authority of the ecclesia, the Pope, the Cardinals, the Bishops and their supporting cast. So in calling humans "ethical children," the very utterance of those words begs the question of just how integral is the church to the process of infantalizing of its members, through a highly structured form of authoritarian parenting.
Starting with God, the Father, in a literal interpretation of the word, taken from the Lord's Prayer, (buttressed by the "unless you become like little children" Biblical exortation) the very theology of the Roman church is one of too many unambiguous black and white rules, exhortations and punishments, and to disobey the church's traditional rules, (ethical and moral rules) is to risk excommunication, ostracizing from the church family, to continue a thread-bare metaphor.
History is littered with the memoires of various profound thinkers/disciples/pilgrims who have "crossed" the authority of that part of the Vatican's structure responsible for discipline. Matthew Fox comes quickly to mind, excommunicated for his heretical views (Original Blessing is the title of one of his more popular books) by then Cardinal Rattzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, only to be embraced by the Episcopal church in the U.S.
Let's also look at the hot-button issue of abortion, one of the church's litmus tests for dogmatic purity, and also for ecclesial militarism, including sadly the shooting of both doctors and nurses who dared to work in clinics providing therapeutic abortions by fanatical "believers". In a perfect world, no one would ever want or even countenance an abortion. The potential of a new human being, conceived and beginning the long road through gestation to birth would not be terminated by anyone lightly, or evil willingly, except under extreme circumstances. However, we have witnessed the combination of both the birth control pill and the feminist movement, in and through both of which developments women have attempting to reclaim control of their own bodies, with the professional counsel of their medical practitioners. It is not incidental that all of those professionals have taken a Hippocratic oath "to do no harm" and have struggled with their pivotal role in those discussions with patients whose lives, (physical and emotional, psychological and spiritual),  have been seriously at risk should they continue a pregnancy (not only in the case of rape, but also in the case of an pregnancy that could injure or even terminate the life of the mother, and also in cases more complicated and potentially tragic for both mother and child).
And, to the birth-control, abortion list we might add the church's relationship to the gay and lesbian community, a relationship impregnated with rejection, contempt and hostility, all of it initiated by the church, based on some phrases deeply embedded in the holy book, written by some men whose vision of both their own world and the concept and definition of a human being, in relation to a deity was, at best limited, parochial and reductive.
All of these hot- button issues, notwithstanding, there is an underlying premise, apparently aimed at two obvious corporate goals, to recruit more people and to control the attitudes and behaviours of those who are recruited, that the church has taken that it represents the true path to God, and that all other paths are in a word heretical. That alone stands as self-sabotage from an ethical and moral perspective, and hardly warrants adherence or acceptance if one is pursuing a relationship with God and an growing awareness of and a commitment to an authentic faith journey.
Assuming the role of God, the parent of the pregnant mother, an ethical authority with real power over the lives of both the mother and the infant, the church has, in effect, positioned itself as the arbiter of each individual case, leaving no room for ambiguity, uncertainty, debate or even consternation and trauma, in a psychological sense. That, too, poses a serious ethical dilemma for those of us not raised in the church, and makes us question the degree of credibility and authority that we ascribe to the comparison of humans as "technical giants and ethical children."
Mature men and women, rather than accept without questioning the edicts of any authority, delve deeply into their own consciences and their own characters, and struggle with serious and complex issues around their lives, including around their sexual lives, and around their right to assisted suicide if the quality of their lives has become so impaired as to render them almost literally vegetables, and for many, around the question of whether or not to take up arms in a military combat that threatens national security. In taking the position of knowing the right answer, in those and other complicated and highly individual life narratives, the church has, in both effect and in literal reality, removed many of the struggles for those who have been conditioned to accept the church's discipline and has thereby eliminated the process of undergoing those very ethical dilemmas which are the only narrow path to "adulthood" in all meanings of that word.
Technological giants, are neither more nor less capable of resisting the church's prescriptions. In fact, the technological capabilities might enhance or impede one's capacity and willingness to enter into the deep dark nights of the soul that parallel and evoke the Gethsemene of each human life. And to eliminate that path, into the darkest night with the heaviest burden, in the name of God, is to render those same people less than God's highest expectations of their potential to make a good and honourable and ethical and moral decision.
In fact, it is only in and through the eyes of such needles of pain and self-examination that humans fully enter their own spiritual journey, previously denied by a myriad of influences, including a culture of positivism and cheerleading self-congratulation as well as a church that lays out a singular path to holiness and purity, and says that their path is God's will.
It is in the exercise of free will, outside of the imposition of an ecclesial pontificate, that humans grow to a maturity unavailable to those whose path is painted for them, even if the motives of that tradition were and are to bring people closer to God.

Our unconscious free-fall into chaos...is it preventable, or inevitable?

Former Liberal leader Bob Rae once commented that Ottawa had ADHD, a collective attention deficit disorder, in his unique way of describing a political and cultural dynamic that sees issues rise to the consciousness of the public and the political class, hold that attention for a short period and then fade from consciousness.
Right now the world's attention is focused on Syria (fading), Ukraine (high), Nigeria (high), the South Korean Ferry disaster (fading) and the extreme weather (rising and falling as the dangers and disasters occur). In the midst of these stories, reports emerge that China's GDP will top the U.S. by 2020, while its income gap currently exceeds that of the U.S.
In Canada, the resignation of Shawn Atleo as Head of the First Nations Chiefs grabbed some attention, apparently over his support for the federal attempt to 'educate' aboriginal peoples, and the protest against both the lack of collaboration with other chiefs and bands and the issues within the bill itself.
However, the question of public "sustainability," that is the capacity and willingness of the public to sustain interest in and demand action on any single issue, rises and falls like the current volatility of the temperatures at least in the eastern part of North America. There is a kind of 'band-wagon' effect that produces water-cooler conversation, even heightened emotions and inquiry among some whose interest in and connection with the various human dynamics that comprise what we could increasingly call a "world culture," allowing for the many nuanced and unique differences in all quarters. Headlines grab attention, and then, as we go about our business, attending to the lives we are attempting to develop and grow, our attention fades, the headline's ink fades both on the page and in our consciousness, and we somehow collect the general impression in our memory bank of 'how we see the world'.
Occasionally, that 'world view' is impacted by an event close to home, the death of a friend, the divorce from our partner, the estrangement of a child, the loss of a job and income and the dignity deficit that accompanies that trauma, and suddenly we are thrown into a kind of free-fall which, consciously or not, foreshadows our mortality including our vulnerability and our dependence on others. Such impacts can have the effect of pushing us into a cocoon, thinking that we will be 'protecting' ourselves from further trauma, and while healing and recovery require 'time out,' there is a real danger that our withdrawal can become permanent. At least, while in trauma and recovery, we have to pay more attention to our immediate needs and exigencies, and much less attention to the world's 'needs' and events.
However, and there are increasing signs that the next generation may be shedding some of their ancestors' collective detachment in their enhanced participation in philanthropics and their increasing detachment from the political engagement that so captured the interest of those parents and grandparents. Whether that development is "sustainable" will take a generation at least to bear fruit and to recruit even more participants in a world whose political leaders shy away from action, preferring the 'show' of action to the much more visible and empirically verifiable school buildings, or trucks of medical supplies and food, or programs of inoculation that address immediate needs among the distressed around the world.
Ruanda, and the massacre of hundreds of thousands in a battle of tribes, failed even to arose the United Nations members to support General Allaire's calls for assistance in the middle of the crisis, although no one in the world could claim ignorance of the tragedy. Syria, likewise, and the details of the daily bombs, refugees and chemical weapons attacks, leading to the accounting data of some 150,000 dead, is another case in point, in which the world knows there is a disaster unfolding, while also not knowing if or how to intervene. Ukraine, too, where violence in the eastern cities continues to grow, and statements of increased sanctions do little to restrain the Russian separatists, and a few soldiers and planes are sent to the area to send a symbolic signal of 'deterrence' to Putin, leaving the world in a state of suspended animation and powerlessness, to either continue to pay attention or to know how to help, on an individual or even a collective basis.
And there is Nigeria, where over 300 young women have been abducted by terrorists, and allegedly sold as slave-wives to members of the terrorist group Boko Haram. And yet, words from inside Nigeria, quoted in the Guardian, worry that this will be another 'spike' of world attention, receding quickly into a collective "glaze" of the eyes, ears, and hearts of the rest of the world to the depth and the dangers and the desperation of the whole situation in that country and beyond, in which people are living in fear for their lives and for the future of their country.
"My fear is that this will become another Kony 2012 where the context and the nuance gets lost," (Nigerian journalist) Tolu Ogunlesi told me, referring to the viral social media campaign centered on Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. "Hopefully the girls are all going to be safe and fine. But even if they get back home, it's still far from the end." (By Jill Filipovic, The kidnapped Nigerian girls show that religious conservatives hate education, The Guardian, May 2, 2014)
While the headlines grab our attention, it is our failure to pay attention to the more detailed and more nuanced and less dramatic and more desperate realities underneath those headlines that need our increased attention, engagement and participation. The drama of countries sliding into "failure" that includes the erosion of the political system, the security apparatus, the food supply chain, the education system, and the ripe and ready "take-over" by agents of terror and hate, promising instant gratification to those desperate for any "attention" is a drama and a developing story to which the world has not collectively paid attention, to the degree that the indicators would suggest is needed.
We are a crisis-oriented, a crisis-management, and a headline-grabbing-and-grabbed culture that responds to the thrill of immediate intervention, while failing to prevent, to build those structures and those systems and those cultural "gardens" from which healthy political and cultural nourishment can and will only grow.
We are, in effect, paving over too many acres not only of tillable land, but of fertile minds and hearts, with insouciance, hopeless and neglect, in our plugging our fingers into the holes in the dykes, in the midst of a tsunami of violence, scarcity, neglect and knowing detachment. Of course, there are too many crises for us to manage, if we separate them by region, by political ideology, by climate and by disease. Yet, there is growing evidence that the world's inhabitants desperately need each other, and the resources available everywhere to engage and counteract the forces that are determined to take advantage of our "detachment," our collective attention deficit disorder and our apathy.
Our towns and cities, even in countries like Canada and the United States pay less and less attention to the plight of their most vulnerable; our states and provinces are increasingly restricted in their support for systems and solutions that we all know would raise 'all boats,' and our national governments are narrowing their focus in dispensing 'international aid' to meagre initiatives that will leave the world generally and collectively exposed to increasing threats from all of the now visible and predictable forces, both human and natural, that are seizing control of our resources, our livelihoods and our interdependent futures.
The "have's" pay less and less attention to the 'have-not's' everywhere, as if to ignore them will make them disappear. The climate deniers and avoiders resist collective action to combat the impact of global warming and climate change. The inequalities of a global economy, while enhancing the position of the wealthiest people and countries, generates an even bigger gap of both consciousness and care for those at the bottom. We are, in effect, sowing the seeds of our own demise, and we can see the evidence of that unconscious collaboration and default encircling the air we breath, the water we drink, the deployment of our symbolic 'forces' as we 'band-aid' our tumors with public relations manuals to enhance our denial and our political narcissism.
The world's climate, economy, political preparedness and spine, its education systems and its supporting infrastructure for sustainability, not only of the environment itself, but of the global political culture that would provide support for all initiatives of sustainability, are all in need of serious remedial intervention dedicated to upgrading all of our response systems to the new biological threats but also to the new political, and terror cells that, too, are resistant to all of the political 'antibiotics' that we have developed over the centuries.
We are, like millions of doctors, a race of people who do not know the diseases we face, although there are clear signs everywhere, who do not know the measures to take to prevent and to resist those diseases, and who seem unconscious to our own future story line, preferring to enjoy the current status quo, and turn a blind eye, a deaf ear, and a drugged intellect to the dangers we face, especially the danger of denying our inter-dependence and our inter-connectedness. And our negligence and insouciance and attention deficit will one day make us wake up to our own potentially monumental crisis...but, after all we specialize in crisis management, so we will pull another rabbit out of our hats then too, right?
Wrong!

Girls abducted, sexual assault rising, gender equality a far-off vision....and violence continues

Although the initial incident occurred some two weeks ago, it is finally picking up 'steam' in the world's coverage. Some 234 young women, ages 16, 17 and 18, were kidnapped from their boarding school dorms in the middle of the night by terrorist thugs and shipped off into the forest in Nigeria and except for a few who escaped, have not been heard from since.
Word reaching the outside world indicates these young women have been sold for $12 to Boko Haram terrorists (definition of Boko Haram: western education is sinful) in what evokes medieval practices and attitudes. The Nigerian government of President Goodluck Jonathan is under growing pressure to find and release the young women and to punish the perpetrators of this heinous crime.
It seems that there are conflicting multiple groups seeking in some cases an Islamic state in the north eastern part of Nigeria, and some seeking a state that enforces the Ten Commandments, both of which groups obviously are using extreme measures to attempt to accomplish their 'religious' or moral convictions through complete control.
George Brown, former Prime Minster of Great Britain, now the point man for the United Nations on the education of young women, has offered UK help in finding and retrieving the young women. Women in Nigeria have taken to the streets of Abuja, the capital city, to protest government inaction, especially since one government official has kept the Nigerian security forces informed on a near-daily basis of movements on the ground by those holding these young women, yet the forces seem paralysed an ineffectual to recover these abductees.
Many observers point to the real problem in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, as anarchy. Some point out that, for decades since independence from Britain, the presidency has shifted from a Christian occupant to a Muslim occupant of the office, and that both communities have lived in harmony, for the most part.
Now, however, things have changed  dramatically. And the 'weapon' or target of choice of those seeking to impose their will through violence seems to be the education of women. Women, in the minds of the terrorists are not supposed to achieve an education, but rather are supposed to get married, have children and stay at home. Naturally in the course of pursuing such a for the west demented goal, schools, mosques, churches are being blown up, and yesterday in Abuja, a car bomb exploded raising the bar on violence and civil instability.
The question of the place, status, meaning and identity of women in the twenty-first century has become one of the defining issues of the planet's social, political and economic spheres. In the west, issues of pay equity, work balance, and sexual assault dominate the headlines. Colleges, the military and increasingly workplaces are experiencing a spike in sexual assaults. Just yesterday, the Obama administration's Justice Department issued a report that pointed a finger at some 55 colleges and universities in the United States that are not conforming to the letter and the spirit of Title Nine, which requires full investigation of all complaints of sexual assault. The U.S. military is reporting a significant spike in reports of incidents of sexual assault, whether that data indicates a rise in the actual occurrence or more likely a rise in the reporting of those incidents. And while the Taliban and terrorist groups like Boko Haram obviously have a very different attitude and approach to the question of the role, meaning purpose and future of women in their society from the attitude and approach in the west generally there is clearly an underlying and not so secret power struggle between men and women going on in many quarters. The Canadian media is today filled with calls for a public inquiry into the issue of missing aboriginal women, numbering by some estimates into the thousands, in unsolved mysteries considered by many to be crimes. Who knows where such an inquiry would lead, and the government appears very reluctant to acquiesce to the demands for one.
The front cover of The Atlantic this week pictures two U.S. media women, Claire Shipman and Katy Kay, representing ABC news and the BBC respectively, who have investigated what they call a lack of confidence among American women, compared to men, although both genders, from their research perform at an approximately equal level. American women do not ask for a raise in pay as frequently as do men; and women settle for considerably less than do their mail counterparts at the end of salary negotiations. The authors and their scholar sources attribute some of this to the "compliant" attitude of school girls. "If life were a continuing school yard, women would rule the world!" were the observations of one of the academics interviewed by Shipman and Kay.
Former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was on the forefront of the political wave's attempt to make 'women's issues' integral to and inseparable from foreign policy issues, while she held that office. Naturally, that kind of high profile for women would have deeply disturbed the cavemen-like attitudes of groups like the Taliban and Boko Haram, and most likely recruits to AlQaeda as well. Only yesterday, the very troubled mayor of Toronto was reported to be making sexually offensive comments in a bar about one of his female opponents in the upcoming election for Mayor.
Misogyny has elements of racism and bigotry within it; yet, it seems to have an even deeper and more nefarious and less easily ameliorated through education component, like the 'precipitate' in E.J. Pratt's celebrated poem, The Truant. Although public discussion and debate of issues of gender relations have increased in the last few decades, so too has the advertising industry's reliance on objectification of women's bodies as a vehicle to sell products of all types to market sectors of all economic ranges. Paralleling this development, the entertainment industry has made billions, perhaps even trillions, trumpeting all nuances of sexuality in song, drama, movie and video, to the point that the presentation of what some call pornography has become a regular component of television programming. And, what is worse, men are calling the shots, while women enact the 'scripts'.
Boys and girls, at a younger age than previously believed, are engaging in sexual activity, if reports from sociologists are to be believed. The time period of adolescence seems to have collapsed, if indications of 'adult' behaviour and fashion and interest are a window of evidence. Movements from the Christian 'right' to promote abstinence among the young have had only minimal effect. The availability of condoms, and the urge to 'express yourself' through the exercise of some of the most powerful emotions in one of the most high-risk activities of human life, linked to the data that in some quarters children are born to single mothers at a rate never before witnessed, linked also to the narrow and misguided perceptions among some young males that they are unwilling or unable to compete with the growing mass of educated young women, and you have a sexual cocktail that is highly explosive, to be somewhat understated.
However, given all of the components of that 'cocktail' there are still many options to a more healthy pursuit of both respect and equality between the genders, omitting violence and fascism and complete domination by men of women, irrespective of the theological or ideological premises of the culture.
I listened as a middle-aged woman responded to a question about the condition of her husband, following an accident in which his truck, jacked up to permit his replacing a broken spring, fell off the jack and partially pinned him. "He has some pain, but he is very stubborn, you know," she said, and then quickly uttered, "So are women!"
And the thought that, only if and when men and women together talk about and pursue their individual and reciprocal respect, while being able to smile at the idiosyncrasies of each gender, without a heavy dose of 'God' as a fixed standard as their fear of being sinful and evil, will these issues of gender equality and respect become less violent and less abusive.
It is very difficult for many men to witness the data that most university graduate programs see a majority of female students, as do most undergraduate programs in North America. And it is very difficult for many women to understand why that would be a problem for men. The stereotypes of sex and gender wrap a restrictive binding around all discussions about sex and gender equality. "All men want...." is one of the most common reductionisms thrown at men; while "women  want complete control"...is one of the more common reductionisms thrown at women. As Shipman and Kay note, while women seem to lack confidence, men suffer the opposite affliction: too much confidence, by comparison.
And, to some, the differences are reason enough for the competition.
Yet, what if it were not a competition, but rather a collaboration, between men and women, in their conversations and in their partnerships, including their marriages, to discover both the strengths and the fears and weaknesses of each person, in a spirit of harmony and security and safety, not of condemnation and power over, but of a determination to celebrate both strengths and vulnerabilities of each, and together to pursue the adventure of adjusting to the realities, in love and in humility, that each finds irritating in the other? What if?....Is that a prospect to simple for consideration in a world gone mad over complexity and competition?
Have we turned the bedroom and the kitchen table into just another chapter of the competition that engenders business, education, and social climbing? Have we so emasculated men, with their own complicity in their insufferable victimhood, that it will take centuries to evolve into something like real equality and real confidence, and not just bravado as its surrogate? Have we so empowered the aspirations of women, as a hedge against what some women call the subjugation of women throughout the centuries, that we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater? Can history really be discerned as the deliberate subjugation of women, for which men will have to pay for the ensuing centuries? Are we really so myopic and so frightened that we see any maturation of either gender as a threat to our status and power? Are we so narrow in our comprehension of what constitutes a purposeful and healthy life that we cannot embrace the flowering of both genders as a gift for the other? Are we so fixated on the balance sheet method of defining the world, that gains made by one segment of the population must be met with losses by another? Have we so reduced the definition of both masculinity and femininity to function and lost the essence of what it means to be a human being, never mind the biological and genetic similarities and differences?
Are we so fixated on the microscopic and the anal that we have lost both sight and appreciation of and for the wholeness of the other, because we have permitted society and culture to define us as function?
It may sound trite and somewhat nostalgic to ask questions that point to the advantages of vulnerability and weakness and insecurity and fear. However, it is in those questions and in those explorations that we do indeed find insight, golden insight and 'aha' moments, that disclose previously hidden truths that have been either too painful to discover and acknowledge or too audacious for our humble indoctrinations from our own spiritual foundation and formation.
Religion may attempt to provide missing courage and strength in our admittedly fragile existence; however, when it is used as a weapon against another, regardless of the other's gender, education, status or power(including powerlessness) it is a seriously flawed deployment of that religion, in the name of whatever deity we espouse and worship.
We have many miles to go into the forest of our own unknowing, into the darknesses of our own nights in order to discern our relationships with each other and with a deity worthy of our adoration. So too, will that deity be only too willing and eager to accompany us on that pilgrimage into the deep recesses of our profound humility, at the expense of our paralyzing hubris, in our pursuit of even a remote approximation of the fullest expression of love in all of its many forms and joys.

Botched execution in Oklahoma...prompts abolitionists to come forward again!

There is something odious about a country proclaiming itself Christian and continuing to seek to stamp out violent crime by imposing the death penalty. And that country, of course, is the United States.
And of course, in a country in which the 'how' is much more important that the 'what' of their collective public decisions, the United States makes a substantial commitment to finding various and sundry methods for completing the task of putting people to death, following evidence and conviction of violent crime.
It is as if the violence that attended the crime is inextricably linked to the violence of the state's pursuit of vengeance, and then, to make it palatable to that segment of the population who both trusts and complies with the state's every decision, paint those executions with a brush of efficiency and effectiveness that would pass muster in an operating room.
With many pharmaceutical companies having bowed out of providing lethal chemicals, the various states still engaged in the practice of capital punishment (some 38 out of the 50 states), now look to compounding chemical companies to deliver the cocktail that will efficiently and effectively inflict the lethal dose of chemicals to "humanely" achieve the goal of death.
If that does not sound like a mouthful of incompatible words, irreconcilable in both the details of the chemistry and the attitudes behind the laws and the history of law enforcement, then what would?
How we treat 'the least' in our society, including the 'criminals' and especially the most violent of those men (and of course the large majority of violent crimes are committed by men), would, perhaps, be considered a litmus test for how a society really operates. It might generate discussion about the role of the public (the state) in the individual lives of the people, including intimate engagement with those conditions which might generate so much anger, hate and desperation that only violent release of that internal 'cocktail' of human emotions (embedded in their own river of hormones). It also might serve as a public model for attitudes and behaviours that would be both sustainable and compatible with compassion, empathy, and a vigorous pursuit of all alternatives in the amelioration of those conditions in which crime is spawned, and less emphasis on the killing formulas through which vengeance might be pursued.
This discussion arises because of the botched execution of a man in Oklahoma last night, and research, found in the Daily Beast, in one of the best pieces of reporting on the subject I have read that brings the issue, not only of the 'how' but also of the 'why' of state executions, to the fore.
We have, in this space for years, taken the position that all capital punishment is wrong.
We continue to hold that view, and seek to promote discussion among others whose minds could and might be changed from supporting that method of crime prevention (it has been proven repeatedly NOT to be a restraint on additional crimes) to support for its abolition.
After you read the excerpt here from the Daily Beast, reflect on your own attitudes and perceptions about capital punishment, through the lens of the United States' experience and consider ways to influence the debate in the direction of abolition.

Last night the state of Oklahoma added to America’s long history of botched executions when it attempted to execute Clayton Derrell Lockett by lethal injection. At 6.23 p.m., a doctor administered the first drug, which corrections officials identified as the sedative midazolam. What followed was an agonizing spectacle that ended when Lockett died at 7.06 p.m.—43 minutes after the drugs began to flow....
From the end of the 19^th century to the present day, the United States has actively tried to find new ways to avoid such mishaps and impose death without unnecessary pain of the kind seen most recently when lethal injections go wrong. The continuing search for an execution method that would prove unfailingly humane and civilized has helped assuage the sensibilities of the American public and to emphatically set capital punishment apart from the heinous crimes it is thought to condemn. Through successive changes in methods of execution, from hanging to electrocution, from the gas chamber to lethal injection, the U.S. has struggled to make the practice of capital punishment appear peaceful and precise and transform execution from dramatic spectacle to a cool, bureaucratic operation.
But we have found no technology which could reliably and effectively achieve this goal.  We have sent condemned criminals to the gallows, executed them by firing squad, electrocution, lethal gas, or using a cocktail of deadly chemicals. Each of these methods of execution was, at the time of its introduction, said to be able reliably to impose death without the unnecessary suffering condemned by the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” None has delivered on that promise.
In recently completed research, we and our collaborators examined all American executions from 1890-2010. We found that 3 percent of those executions were botched in one way or another, from the slow strangulations and decapitations that occasionally occurred during hangings to the smoke and burning flesh of the electric chair to the agonizing death throes of those strapped to gurneys in lethal injection chambers. In fact, executions by lethal injection are botched at a higher rate than any of the other methods employed since the late 19th century, 7 percent.
Botched executions have not been the particular plague of a handful of states or of a single inadequate technology. Rather, they have happened in every region of the country regardless of the frequency of executions carried out. And each and every method of execution has its distinctive flaws, which frequently have been compounded by malfeasance or simple human error.
In the hours and days following executions gone wrong, the public gets a rare look beyond the image of highly controlled, efficient, and dignified executions that the government seeks to project. But, all too often, the initial wave of shock and horror soon gives way to resignation and the tendency to dismiss botched executions as mere accidents.
But history teaches a different lesson. Botched executions are neither freak occurrences nor unfortunate accidents. Rather, like the errors that occur when innocent people are sentenced to death, they are an inherent and unavoidable part of the system of capital punishment in the United States.
By Austin Sarat, Robert Henry, Weaver Heather Richard , Lethal Injection Leads to the Most Botched Executions, Daily Beast, April 30, 2014)